Agents in the field had in fact tried to raise the alarm about the Prosper circuit more than a year earlier.
Courier Andrée Borrel, a working-class Frenchwoman with a nose for action and adventure, had arrived in France with Lise de Baissac in September 1942. Her role was to work for the circuit’s leader, Francis Suttill, whose own code name, Prosper, gave the network its name. Borrel used her intimate knowledge of Paris to not only carry messages but conduct acts of sabotage. Her skill and bravery encouraged Suttill to make her his second in command.
Posing as a brother and sister selling agricultural products, they made a formidable partnership. Constantly on the move, they recruited new agents, found farmers willing to receive air drops on their land, and sought out barns and buildings where arms and munitions could be stored.
The development of the Prosper network and its subcircuits meant that by the end of 1942 there was a substantial and well-organized agent network across the occupied zone of France. It had grown quickly, expanding out of Suttill’s Physician network. It had excellent support from the local French who, like the agents themselves, generally believed that the Allied invasion would come during 1943. By the end of May 1943, the Prosper network had received 240 containers of arms and munitions.
However, such networks could not be secure indefinitely, and with expansion came new faces and greater security problems. As more and more agents were sent in, very often their French language skills were no better than the average schoolchild’s, and couriers had to travel even longer distances and take greater risks to link between agents and deliver messages and supplies.
Francine Agazarian, a twenty-nine-year-old secretary from Narbonne with film-star good looks, had landed with her husband by Lysander on March 17, 1943, and was immediately carrying messages and explosives around Paris and into villages in the countryside. Very early on she found herself on a busy train traveling from Poitiers to Paris. “I sat on my small suitcase in the corridor, a uniformed German standing close against me. . . . Tied to my waist, under my clothes, was a wide black cloth belt containing bank notes for ‘Prosper,’ a number of blank identity cards and a number of ration cards; while tucked into the sleeves of my coat were crystals for ‘Prosper’ radio transmitters. The crystals had been skilfully secured to my sleeves by Vera Atkins herself before my departure from Orchard Court. My .32 revolver and ammunition were in my suitcase. The ludicrousness of the situation somehow eliminated any thought of danger.”
On June 21, 1943, Borrel, Suttill, and another member of the network met at an outdoor café near the Gare d’Austerlitz to wait for the arrival of four agents, including Yvonne Rudellat, who had spent almost a year working as an agent in the Loire Valley. The four never showed up.
Two days later Borrel and fellow agent Gilbert Norman met at his apartment near the Bois de Boulogne and worked into the night coding messages. Shortly after midnight there was a knock at the door and a shout, “Ouvrez! Police allemande!” A few hours later the Germans picked up Suttill. All three were taken to 84 Avenue Foch, the much-feared headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)—the intelligence agency of the SS and a sister organization to the Gestapo—where Borrel showed fearless contempt for her captors and “a silence so disdainful that the Germans did not attempt to break it.”
Soon after, Gilbert Norman sent a message to London. He appeared to be working as usual. But in his message, Norman—considered to be one of the most adept and reliable of radio operators—had omitted one of his security checks. Buckmaster was alerted.
What Buckmaster did next not only was foolish but also signed Norman’s death warrant. He sent a message to Norman reprimanding him for forgetting the check. He not only ignored the warning but also alerted the Germans to the fact that Norman had tried to deceive them.
While Andrée Borrel had been required to spend every day on the move, in an almost continual whirl of activity, Lise de Baissac, who had landed in France with her, had to carry out a very different role.
Small in stature and reserved in character, de Baissac had impressed her instructors from the very start. “Intelligent, extremely conscientious, reliable, and sound in every way,” one stated. “Is quite imperturbable and would remain cool in any situation,” another reported.
Her mission was to remain quiet and underground in the university town of Poitiers, just north of the demarcation line. Here, she lived alone in a two-room apartment and provided a contact point for new agents. She found them shelter and contacts and made sure their identity papers were up to date.
Her life was largely a solitary one; her only regular contacts were an auctioneer and his family, who had Resistance links. She had no wireless operator or courier and traveled alone on her bicycle to meet people from other networks.
She had to be careful when approaching people she had known before the war to see if they wished to join her Resistance network, Artist. Sometimes people were interested; often they were not. Once, she saw a friend in a restaurant and invited him to work with her. “Definitely not,” he told her. “I have eight children to look after, four of my own and four of my brother’s who’s dead. I can’t put them at risk.” He never joined; she never asked him again.
The agents de Baissac worked with came and went, many going on to the north and east of her to the ever-expanding Prosper network. The only SOE friendship she would allow herself was with Mary Herbert, her brother Claude’s courier from the Scientist network, who brought her messages. Occasionally, de Baissac would go to a favorite café of Claude’s in Bordeaux to wait for him. She saw that Claude and Mary had become close and had started a love affair.
In February 1943 de Baissac met the newly arrived air liaison agent, Henri Déricourt, who said he liked many of the landing grounds she had selected and that he would use them. She found Déricourt efficient and courteous, even charming. She had no idea the sequence of events he was about to put into play.
By the end of May she had arranged the arrival of thirteen agents, including Francine Agazarian. With no radio of her own, she had had to use Prosper wireless operators to communicate with London. Both she and Claude, who visited Paris regularly, now had strong links to the Prosper network. In 1943 that was a dangerous relationship for any agent in France.
Born in Amiens, France, on April 28, 1912, Odette Sansom was the daughter of a First World War hero, Gaston Brailly, who was killed in Verdun in 1918. Her childhood had been filled with illness, including meningitis, which made her blind for a year. By her teens her parents were both dead and she was sent to a convent to be educated. At seventeen she had refused the offer to be trained as a nun and left the convent. Two years later she had met and married an Englishman, Roy Sansom, who was running a boardinghouse in Boulogne. In 1939 he had brought her and their two daughters to England. He had joined the army, and she had gone to live with her mother-in-law near Bath in Somerset to await the birth of her third child. In 1941 she had responded to requests by the War Office for people to send photographs of France. Her photographs encouraged the War Office to see her as a potential recruit to the SOE. She was interviewed by Jepson, and she became a member of an SOE women’s course in May 1942.
She developed a fearsome reputation during training for an almost defiant strength of character. “Her main weakness is a complete unwillingness to admit that she could ever be wrong,” noted one instructor. Buckmaster added with some admiration, “She did it her way and that was it.”
Sansom was motivated by patriotism but reluctant to volunteer for operations because of her children. “I left England with a broken heart and I knew that nothing else that could happen to me would ever be that painful; it never was,” she recalled.
In the final stage of training, on her parachute course, she was injured and was ruled out of being parachuted into France—the SOE would have to deliver her some other way. Sansom arrived in France around the same time as Andrée Borrel, Yvonne Rudellat, and Lise de Baissac. She landed on the Mediterranean coast east of Mar
seille on October 31, 1942, only days before the Germans sent their troops south into the unoccupied zone. She landed with Mary Herbert, George Starr, who would develop a key réseau to the southwest, and a radio operator named Marcus Bloom.
Sansom had been supposed to work in Auxerre but instead was reassigned to a réseau run by a dynamic young man named Peter Churchill, who was working hard to bring under control the large but unorganized Resistance group Carte, named after its leader André Girard’s code name. Sansom became Churchill’s courier and, eventually, his lover. They worked closely with a wireless operator named Adam Rabinovitz, code-named Arnaud.
The Riviera was a difficult place to work. Cannes was a playground, with a burgeoning black market. Marseille was a center for police activity, where there were regular roundups, rafles, to find people for forced labor. A transient population of people had fled from other areas of the country; Sansom felt many were too “ostentatious and flamboyant” for undercover work. Some résistants were too proud of their clandestine role, as if wearing a label to say they were members of the Resistance. “I felt fear,” Sansom said. “I felt that anything could happen any time.”
Sansom’s uneasiness was well founded; things started to quickly go wrong. André Girard fell out with his deputy, Frager, so they got little done. Churchill then backed Frager, causing a rift with Girard. A résistant named André Marsac fell asleep on a train between Marseille and Paris and lost the suitcase he was carrying. Inside was a list of Carte members and contacts.
Finally, in January 1943, shortly after the Germans razed much of the old quarter of Marseille to the ground, claiming it was full of criminals, Peter Churchill’s network was blown.
The key figures managed to get away. Churchill, Sansom, and Rabinovitz headed to the Haute-Savoie and the beautiful countryside around Lake Annecy. They made the waterside village of Saint-Jorioz their base and hooked up with a strong existing Resistance force. Among them was a man named Roger Bardet who, it was said, had escaped from a camp in Germany. Sansom did not like him at all.
In March, Churchill and Frager were picked up by a Lysander and flown to England to seek guidance on the split between Girard and the Carte group. By the time Churchill returned both he and Sansom were in the jaws of a trap.
Many of the female agents who had arrived in France during late 1942 and early 1943 had been arrested by that summer. The massive expansion of networks, seen most vividly in Prosper, was about to implode in a sordid, intricate web of betrayal and double-dealing. Henri Déricourt—the SOE’s air liaison agent—was at its heart.
Having arrived in France in January 1943, he had made contact with an old acquaintance, Karl Bömelburg, a high-ranking SD officer in Paris. Déricourt now became a double agent, listed by the SD as agent number 48.
Déricourt’s betrayal had devastating consequences. Through his role as organizer of SOE flights into France he met leaders, couriers, and wireless operators. They included Andrée Borrel and Lise de Baissac. Déricourt reported to the SD on agents’ arrivals and where they went. Each time he reported back to Bömelburg there were further, more detailed, requests for information.
The Nazis were certain that the Allies were planning to land in France some time during the summer of 1943. In April, at a secret meeting in an apartment in Paris, Bömelburg told Déricourt he wanted advanced warnings of agent drops and pickups so that his men could observe them. This enabled the SD to watch a network develop, trapping new couriers and résistants as they joined. An operation near Amboise involving two Lysanders was watched by SD agents.
Meanwhile, Déricourt met and spent some time with Prosper, Francis Suttill. If the agent network was like a spider’s web, there was now a predator hiding at its very center.
Despite the SD’s apparent control of the situation through the double agent Déricourt, the Abwehr made the first key arrest. The German army’s intelligence department, which had an enmity-filled rivalry with the SD, had been holding the list of names André Marsac had lost in the suitcase on the train. That spring the Abwehr moved to arrest Marsac and find out who and what he knew. It had come to believe that the long list of Carte names were actually those of members of the massive Prosper network, which both the Abwehr and the SD were keen to crack.
The Abwehr team was led by an innocuous-looking man in his early forties. With a longish nose and sly brown eyes, Hugo Bleicher’s corkscrew mind now came into play. He visited Marsac in Frèsnes prison and introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Henri, an officer representing an anti-Nazi group of German officers who wanted to make contact with Allied High Command. His story convinced Marsac, who wrote a letter of recommendation for the colonel and sent him south to Saint-Jorioz.
In April, Bleicher made contact with Sansom and repeated the same story. He wanted a flight to London to discuss terms for peace with Britain. He told her he had arrested Marsac to save him from the Gestapo. Sansom was suspicious and afraid. To make matters worse, Roger Bardet, whom she deeply disliked, met the colonel too. Bardet suggested he visit Frèsnes to see Marsac and to confirm the German’s story.
This he did, urging Sansom to schedule a Lysander pickup for Colonel Henri.
Sansom stalled, saying she could not get a plane until April 18. Bardet became angry and left. Sansom could not have known it, but Bardet was by now a key informer for the Abwehr. He was Bleicher’s man.
The SOE in Baker Street advised Sansom to cut all contact with the man calling himself “Colonel Henri.” Sansom rushed around Annecy telling members of the Resistance that they were in danger and should go into hiding, but she did not immediately do the same herself.
Peter Churchill returned from London, and they both made preparations to go underground. They were too late. Bardet had told the Abwehr that Churchill was back.
On the night of April 16, 1943, Bleicher and his men arrested them both. The network’s radio operator, Rabinovitz, escaped.
A week later, Bleicher struck again, arresting two sisters whose apartment in Avenue de Suffren in Paris was a meeting point for the Prosper network.
The arrests led nowhere immediately, and it was once again the SD, through Déricourt, that regained the upper hand in the Wehrmacht counterintelligence crackdown. In his role, Déricourt handled the SOE “airmail”—reports too long to transmit by radio that were instead written down to be couriered on Lysanders making agent pickups. Déricourt brought this “airmail” to the SD to be copied before it was taken on to a landing zone. This gave the Germans a detailed picture of the Resistance—its strengths, weaknesses, and locations where agents were in need of arms or support. The SD also continued to track the arrival of agents.
Vera Leigh, a forty-year-old dress designer who landed with three others on May 13, 1943, at a field in the Cher Valley, near Tours, was followed to Paris, where she was to set up a new réseau, Inventor, to work alongside the Prosper network. Leigh’s companions were Julienne Aisner, Sidney Jones, and Marcel Clech. Aisner was to be a courier, Jones an arms instructor, and Clech a wireless operator.
On June 16, four more agents were watched upon arrival. These included Diana Rowden, an English-born journalist whom the Germans followed to her destination, and Noor Inayat Khan who, as a radio operator, would try to alert the SOE to what was happening. They would be betrayed by Henri Déricourt.
Suttill already distrusted Déricourt and arranged his own return to France on June 12, 1943. Overburdened and exhausted by running such a massive network, he was convinced his network had been infiltrated by the Germans.
It was then that the SD moved in. It arrested résistants, uncovered hauls of arms, and followed lead after lead. This crackdown alerted the police to look for agents matching the descriptions of Yvonne Rudellat and Pierre Culioli. They were the first agents arrested. Next came Borrel and Suttill.
By the end of August 1943 the Germans had made fifteen hundred arrests. More followed, including Noor Inayat Khan and Frager. A network designed to organize and unite Resistance in r
eadiness for the key event of the war in the west—the invasion of France—had ceased to exist. But Vera Leigh’s network had so far survived.
Vera Leigh had been working hard as a courier for the developing Inventor réseau in Paris since she arrived by Lysander on May 13, 1943. Although born in Leeds in the north of England, Leigh had been adopted, while still a baby, by a rich American who had racehorse stables near Paris. While only twenty-four she had created her own dress design company and became a society figure in the French capital. She had fled the city after the occupation and worked with the Pat evasion line with Madeleine Damerment and Virginia Hall in Lyon. Like Hall, she became a wanted figure by the Germans and fled over the Pyrenees, eventually reaching Britain, where she joined the SOE. A crack shot, she was known for a fast mind and pleasant manner. She worked closely with another SOE agent, Julienne Aisner.
From the time she had landed by moonlight she carried messages, wireless components, and sabotage materials across Paris, and, well-known there from her dress design days, she began to meet people from her past life, including some who had been involved in the “Pat” line.
Since her arrival back in Paris, the SD—thanks to Déricourt’s betrayal—had known all about her. The SD and Abwehr were waiting for the other Resistance networks to develop so as to make their final haul even greater in number.
In the end it was the Abwehr, looking to match the SD’s success with Prosper, that moved in. On October 30, Leigh was drinking coffee in the Café Mas near the Place des Ternes with another résistant when German officers strode in. At their head was Sergeant Bleicher. He walked straight to their table and placed them under arrest.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 21